Tech Plan
A substantial number of large and small organisations still operate as segmented departments resulting in redundant data entries and overlapping processes.
Efficiencies and effectiveness of outputs are hampered leading to lost opportunities in revenue, profit and customer success.
At Shiker we break silos across your lead to cash processes, guide you through a structured yet concise approach to formulate a clear and comprehensive plan of action encompassing the integration of technology, optimisation of processes, alignment of personnel and data ensuring a holistic improvement in your end to end operations.
Improving Efficiency
Most B2B companies operate similarly and face common challenges, especially in the Lead to Contract, Contract to Fulfilment, and Contract to Cash processes. They struggle to align their tech systems and make the most of them. Improving their overall IT setup is often hampered by a lack of focus, varied skills, and commitment. Without a strong IT platform, integrating acquisitions into the organisation is tough.
The Usual Suspects
- Siloed Data
Teams working in their silos, poor collaboration across organisation. - Processes
No one is thinking end to end processes, leading to handoffs and hand rolling. - Tooling
Inadequate or overly complex tooling. Tools produced without coordination. - Structure & Governance
Lack of governance and ownership.
Challenges with Obvious Solutions
Recruiting staff
Difficulty in attracting and retaining IT staff (e.g. salesforce consultant). Lack of best practice from the market.
Using Vendors
Vendors are typically specialists in an area, so managing multiple vendors is a challenge. Their motivation is to increase billing by over configuring applications.
Proceeding with manual processes
Difficultly in scaling especially when acquiring other companies. People dependency leading to business risk.
Improving Effectiveness of Net New Sales & Upsell
In business and product management, a constant challenge is balancing long-term improvements with meeting immediate customer needs. Products gained through acquisitions still need to be smoothly added to the overall lineup. Also, there’s a clear lack of alignment between product adoption, customer success efforts, product roadmap planning, and sales strategy.
The Usual Suspects
- Siloed Data
Teams working in their silos, poor collaboration across organisation. - Customer feedback
Interpretation of customer feedback and conversation to roadmap is misplaced. - Product adaptation feedback
Poor end-to-end connection between adoption and upsell apps. - Product marketing
‘A product must market itself’ is often lost as the company scales and gains marketing skills.
Challenges with Obvious Solutions
Throw people at the problem
Often results in confused roadmap, trying to accommodate everyone.
Buying tools
Easy in current SaaS world to buy tools but without clarity on what problem we are solving, this does not help.
Product adaptation
Try and get more and more data from customers, without strategising how to use it.
Marketing focus
Get an experienced marketeer is often the solution but may result in missing the core value add of the product.
TECH PLAN
Efficiency improvement – our approach
We take a end to end process approach – Lead to Contract, Contract to Cash and Contract to Fulfilment
Product Roadmap and Market alignment approach
Our approach focuses on close co-operation between Product, R&D, Customer Success and Marketing
TECH PLAN
Case Study
The example below is from a growing SaaS company. We break down the current end to end process (e.g. below) Lead to Contract process into it’s component parts, and then compare the processes & tooling for each area to industry best practice. Some areas work better than others, but the areas that do not work well impact the overall effectiveness of the organisation…
Key:
- Aligned to best practice
- Aligned to best practice, being implemented
- Partly aligned to best practice, urgent
- Partly aligned to best practice, not urgent
- Not aligned to best practice
- Not aligned to best practice, not urgent
Marketing
- Website
- Events
- Product Marketing
- Demand generation
- Campaign management
- Data capture and reporting
- MQL management
- Lead Nurture
- Existing customers
- Partner Channel
Business Development
- PACTT / CHAMP approach maturity
- Information capture
- Contact enrichment
- Outbound pipe generation
- BDE handover to sales
Sales
- SQL process
- Process and tool usage clarity
- Demo environments
- Sales rigour / cadences
- Information capture
- Forecasting
- Sales enablement
- CPQ
- Partner channel
Contract
- Sales order
- Compliance
- Contract redlining and negotiation
- Contract repository
- ARR database and subscription management
- Maximise Click wrap usage
…We drill down and explain why we believe each particular area (e.g. “ARR and subscription management” as seen below) is not aligned to industry best practices. We then provide detailed recommendations of what can be done to align to best practice…
The Goal
Base ARR from CRM
+ Innovation
+ CPI
-Churn
+ Upsell
-Downsell
+ Cloud Migration
-Maintenance reduction
+ forex
= Real /True ARR
Subscription management
is the automated process which ensures the ARR database is updated regularly.
How to Get There
Technology
Include all the data fields in the CRM required for ARR calculations, to the extent possible. Align CPQ roadmap to achieve this.
Use reporting tools to bring the datasets together and create reports for various definitions of ARR / NRR,
Ensure separation between operations/data capture layer and reporting layer. Never do data manipulation in reporting layer!
Process
Best practice: Data to be filled in the CRM by the account exec. Exceptions / non-standard opportunities should go through boundary approvals within the CRM tool.
…We collate the analysis for all areas and present the big picture to the Execs and board, so that they get an understanding of the processes and tech at an organisational level. The next step is to prioritise and determine the right areas to be identified for improvement.
We subsequently work with the execs to set out the improvement approach – in this case we used the concept of CIIs (Continuous Improvement Initiatives). We assign owners, prioritise, and agree on project plans. During our intervention, we also coach and mentor leaders and staff in the areas of industry standards, collaboration, and the SaaS way of working.
- These initiatives were called CIIs (Continuous improvement initiatives) instead of projects, so that the concept of driving continuous improvement gets embedded in the organisation.
- The 11 CIIs were ranked by their scale of benefits (cost savings/increased revenue/ reduced risk) and effort, so as to pick the low hanging fruit. The 5 marked in red were chosen as the ones to target immediately.
- The teams created to address these CIIs were purposefully built to be cross functional, to drive team work across departments.
